What’s wrong with media today: If you want to know what’s wrong with old/big media, just watch TV news over a holiday weekend. It’s all so perfectly predictable that you could write it all before seeing it, any of you could. And we’re not just talking about dinky local stations; the Today Show is just as bad: Let’s go to the airport and have some poor if overpaid shmuck stand there and say the same stuff all over again about the busiest day for travel and how you should get there early and what the price of gas is and how many will die on the highways and how Sunday will be worse and….

When I worked on newspapers, I long wanted to declare just one day in which all stories would (a) not come from flacks and (b) not come from predictable formulas. Just one day.

Amen, Sir: Salman Rushdie is the sole voice of reason in the Islamic world.

Sole?

Well if I can’t hear any others above the din of hate, that’s the only census I can make.

Rushdie has another spectacular opinion piece in the NY Times begging for other voices of Islamic reason:

Where, after all, is the Muslim outrage at these events? As their ancient, deeply civilized culture of love, art and philosophical reflection is hijacked by paranoiacs, racists, liars, male supremacists, tyrants, fanatics and violence junkies, why are they not screaming?

At least in Iran the students are demonstrating. But where else in the Muslim world can one hear the voices of the fair-minded, tolerant Muslim majority deploring what Nigerian, Egyptian, Arab and Dutch Muslims are doing? Muslims in the West, too, seem unnaturally silent on these topics. If you’re yelling, we can’t hear you.

If the moderate voices of Islam cannot or will not insist on the modernization of their culture

Birds of a feather snooze together: The real problem with Al Gore attacking FoxNews is that it only reinforces his reputation as the duke of dull. Love it or hate it, FoxNews is the only entertaining/watchable news channel (it’s the one I watch; it is the Howard Stern of news channels: I watch it to see what they’ll say next). Thus it figures that dull Al would not like it. No amount of Letterman time will erase this image. Love him or hate him, he is dull.